Prepared by Professor Ira M. Price, Secretary International Sunday School Association Lesson Committee.

These International Lessons are undoubtedly the best on the market at the present time, although they are very far from being perfect.  Gradual changes, coming from experience in the local Sunday school, will modify them considerably in the next few years, and they may actually prove to be forerunners for an almost entirely new series of courses and lessons.  They have been generously received by the eager workers in the local Sunday school, as an advance on the Uniform Lessons, and where they are now being tried satisfaction, for the most part, is being evinced.  A great deal of dissatisfaction has been found with the treatment of these Graded Lessons in some quarters, the Lesson Helps being too mature for teen age boys. However, in appraising the value of these Graded Lessons, two things should be kept in mind, viz.:  the selection of the Lesson Material, and the Lesson Help Treatment of the selected material. Opposition to the lessons should never be taken because of the Lesson Helps.  These can be remedied by the denominational publishing houses, if their attention is called to the weakness or mistake of treatment, and the teen age teacher can give great assistance to the denominational editors by counseling with them.

Here and there the suggestion has sprung up for a Graded Uniform Lesson.  That is precisely what the treatment of the Uniform Lesson was for a number of years, and is yet.  It is not adaptation of treatment that is needed, but adaptation of material that is demanded—­courses of study that fit the religious, spiritual need of the various stages of development.  This much is positively settled.

There is, however, some good reason and very strong ground for uniform cycles, based on seasonable development rather than on chronological years and intellectual rating.  In some places the present Elementary International Graded Lessons are being used just this way, although they do not yield themselves readily to this usage.  Cycles of four courses for the three main divisions of boyhood, nine to twelve years, thirteen to sixteen years, and seventeen to twenty years, four courses to each period, based on the general, seasonable development of each period, have much in their favor.  Thus we might have four courses built on Individual Heroism, four on Altruistic Heroism, and four on the Social Adaptation which marks the reflective period between seventeen and twenty.  Boys do not mature by years.  Growth and development is a jump from plateau to plateau.

This would fit in also with the general objective of the Sunday school, and is not the mere impartation of information, but the letting loose of moral and religious values in life.  The latter is produced more by contact of personality with personality than by intellectual processes.  Should such a plan ever be adopted the courses of study must be pedagogically arranged and in keeping with the best findings of psychological usage.